THE NIGHTHUNTER

 A coalmining village in a valley in South Wales during the 1950’s.
                                                   
“Get up off that doorstep you’ll give yourself piles” Mam said as she stepped over me giving one of her smiles as she turned up the hill towards the shop clutching her ration book and an almost empty purse. The patch in the arse of my trousers did nothing to quell the cold coming from that thick grey stone doorstep. It was still damp from her scrubbing and polishing with a slate. I never noticed my bum was cold until she mentioned it as I had been daydreaming. Not about how she was going to buy enough food to feed our Dad and us eight kids from an almost empty purse, but about clouds, and squirrels, and cows in the woods burying nuts in the grass…….or something like that.
I was about ten years old and I think out teacher should not have recited that poem for the class to learn so close to our dinner time. Not when all of us were distracted by the smell we could all have eaten that was coming from the school canteen just the other side of the corridor from our classroom. The best part of the day, free school dinners. Taking the strain away from Mam’s purse.
I had also been daydreaming about a way perhaps I could ease the food situation a little, but that would be later tonight when the whole house was asleep.
When everyone had finally come up to bed at last, it seemed like I had waited hours for this to happen. Patiently laying there in the semi-dark as passing cars lit up the bedroom with their headlights as they drove passed, then semi-darkness again. The straw mattress was hard and uncomfortable and I would be glad to get up and off of it as tonight I was going back downstairs while everyone slept.

Back down to sit in the semi-darkness of our kitchen come living room of our two down, three up terraced house that was shared with mam, dad and their eight children, myself included.
I crossed the landing careful not to bump into the “piss bucket” dad had placed there for everyone to pee in during the night. I did not want to wake anyone up after waiting so long for them all to go to sleep, for tonight I had a date with destiny. I reached the top of the stairs and went down, stopping one step up from the bottom. I turned the doorknob and shoved the door open with my foot.
My hand went around the doorframe into the room, feeling for the light switch on the wall and hoped the loud click it made when I switched on the light would not wake anyone up. Everything was suddenly so bright I had to shade my eyes from the glare of the 100 watt bulb which hung from the ceiling on twisted brown flex with no light shade. As the light came on there was a loud scurrying on the oilcloth floor as the small army of cockroaches run for cover into the cupboards either side of the old black-lead fire-grate which still held the dying embers of the fire.
No way would I ever go down that last step of the stairs and onto the floor without the light on to drive away the cockroaches, or “Black Pats” as we called them. With the light still on, I went into the pantry under the stairs to get a candle.  
I had put it there earlier in the evening and had stuck it to an upturned lid off a national dried baby’s milk tin. I lit it from the embers of the fire… placed it on the table… and got my gun.
Turning the light out I made my way to the settee and loaded it.  Placing it across my lap I sat there in the silence, and waited.



The settee I was sitting on was an old Chaise-lons that dad had pulled out of the river for firewood. It had the curved arm on the one end but the back rail was missing. Dad had decided not to chop it up and re-covered the base and arm with a piece of an old conveyor belt also fished out of the river. It was unbelievably hard to sit on and unbelievably uncomfortable as well, but it shone like glass from mam’s  polish and the bums of eight children sliding up and down it all day.
I sat there staring at the pantry door I had left ajar. The fire was almost out by now and I was getting cold. With my back against the arm of the “settee“, I drew my legs up and placed the rifle butt between them with the barrel pointing at the ceiling.
Then I must have had a premonition as I placed the butt into my shoulder and resting the barrel on my knees, I aimed the gun at the pantry door. It was just as he stuck his head out, and a micro second later… I had blown his bloody brains out.
I though that’s the last lump of cheese you’ll ever pinch from our house mister mouse. Mission accomplished, I picked it up by it’s tail and threw it on the fire’s dying embers. I wiped up the blood left on the lino, blew out the candle and went back up to bed.
I shivered as I took a pee in the bucket. Just then Dad called out, “That you Len, what was that bang”.  “I kicked the bucket taking a pee Dad“. I could have sworn I heard a muffled snigger from his bedroom as I got back onto that cold straw mattress thinking, yes, and I wasn’t the only one to kick the bucket tonight either.